Guild Wars 2

FrouFrou.4958:

Jeknar.6184:

How about exhaustion be applied upon using supplies instead of dropping the siege? I can pretty much drop 3 trebs and waste 300 supplies under the 3 minute frame.

How will that work if you are all alone repairing a wall/gate or building defensive siege? Happens quite often that a dedicated scout or the few oddballs are fixing things while the commander runs away with the zerg towards new adventures or you are just in a tough outmanned situation.

Or, as in my case recently, I was fixing SM after a heavy sieging, intent on boosting my repairer achievement. I got probably better than 300 points (don’t worry, I pulled it from our far keep that never got more than 30 below max supply).

It seems like there are legitimate reasons to do just about anything that might be called trolling, under different circumstances.

Equal Enforcement:

• Whatever solution is reached, Commanders should not be exempt from them. I’ve seen dedicated trolls who are themselves Commanders that intentionally divert the army in a hazardous direction.

Crippling Edge Cases:
The first thing I’d like to bring up are some edge cases that should never be possible. One person should never be able to have a hugely adverse effect on the map. Here are some of the worst cases I’ve seen:

• Draining 100% of a Structure’s Supply: I have seen cases where one person will build Ballista on mass in a fully upgraded keep and draining all 1,700 of its supply. This should not be possible for anyone to do. I don’t know a good number for this off-hand. As an example, this is a rule that would help curb this behavior: A keep would, for example, only allow one person to drain 400-500 Supply per hour at the very most.

• Siege Capping a Map: It should be impossible for one player to fill an entire map up with siege by themselves. Let’s say the total map cap for siege is 150 per team. It should not be possible for 1 player to have more than 50 pieces of active siege on a map. There is virtually no case where one person would need to do this.
  
  Think about it like this: Offensive siege (dropped frequently by Commanders) is usually destroyed, and therefore is constantly decreasing from the cap. The siege that remains on a map is usually defensive siege which is protected behind walls and gates.

• Flame Ram Trolling: Flame Rams should rot after 15 minutes if they have not dealt damage to anything. This will destroy 100% of all troll Flame Rams built inside structures, while leaving legitimate ones unaffected. I’ve seen players refresh many Flame Rams in an effort to try to siege cap a map.

Creating the wrong type of siege to hit area siege caps

• Build Site Confusion: This problem can be first addressed by distinguishing between different build sites. How many times has someone thrown down a build site at a gate, only to find out it’s a Trebuchet? It would be great if each build site looked unique in some way. A simple idea would be to give the siege a floating icon of its type above it, even when it’s a build site. Also, when building siege, it would help if it said: “Build Trebuchet” instead of just “Build.”

On Golems:

• One thing to keep in mind when making these rules is that Siege Golems can be exempt from most of them. They are expensive and don’t count towards the local or map-wide siege cap, and building them en mass is usually the way they are deployed.

Why don’t we make 2 players a requirement to build siege effectively ?

Example: Players get the “Exhaustion” buff, if they build up siege entirely by themselves.

Nokaru.7831:

On Golems:

• One thing to keep in mind when making these rules is that Siege Golems can be exempt from most of them. They are expensive and don’t count towards the local or map-wide siege cap, and building them en mass is usually the way they are deployed.

One flaw here: if your keep has 5 omegas for defense purposes trolls sometimes destroy them on purpose by jumping of the keep walls.

The problem is that siege is too important, because players are spending more time attacking doors than players.

The defend keep is rare, the defended objective is almost unheard of.

The entire WvW system is based on players attacking doors, not players.

Until you address that issue you will continue to see players troll or abuse the system. You can not design a system that is fun, intuitive and immune to trolls.

You can only fix the ‘siege troll problem’ by addressing the larger issues in WvW.

Xae.7204:

The problem is that siege is too important, because players are spending more time attacking doors than players.

The defend keep is rare, the defended objective is almost unheard of.

The entire WvW system is based on players attacking doors, not players.

Until you address that issue you will continue to see players troll or abuse the system. You can not design a system that is fun, intuitive and immune to trolls.

You can only fix the ‘siege troll problem’ by addressing the larger issues in WvW.

Defending T3 towers as well as T3 keeps is usually top priority. The best Zerg fights are based around a objective. I have no idea where you got these experiences from.

Brujeria.7536:

One flaw here: if your keep has 5 omegas for defense purposes trolls sometimes destroy them on purpose by jumping of the keep walls.

I was referring to rules with regards to supply, siege cap and building. It’s a good point that you bring up though.

Golem Suicide Griefing:

• One person should not be able to get in multiple golems and toss them off the side of structures killing them. Taking significant or sustained falling damage should prevent a player from using a golem again for an extended period of time.

I’ve discussed this issue many times with many people. These are the ideas we came up with back then;

Marking the siege: Basically any player will be able to rate a siege by right clicking the ally siege and giving a downvote or upvote. This way it either refreshes the uptime of that siege or reduce it. If too many players downvote a siege it’ll break down and return the supply it consumed to nearest tower or garrison. A player can only rate a siege once.

Downside: A large group of people, lets say a troll guild, can downvote entire defense of a structure, which is troublesome.

Marking the builder: when x amount of players downvotes a siege, builder of it is unable to build any siege for y amount of time. It’s can be either forgiving or punishing.

Downside: If too many people downvotes, lets say a commanders siege, it’d be bad. Like, very bad. Again, putting an upvote option for marked siege could solve the issue.

TLTR: Add a thumbs up on siege drop down menu after it’s built.

nihbrin.4297:

Marking the builder

The problem with this is that the siege doesn’t remember who the owner is if they happen to leave the map.

1. make better report system and scan reports for keywords
(better report system is anyway needed)
2. make it priority for gm’s to check those reports and players, literally (10’s of) minutes
(this is hard but after few days after trolls get burned, active gm’s numbers could be reduced)
3. ban troll accounts and then try to find real accounts of same players and ban them too
(lots of dumb dumbs dont know nothing about ip structure)
4. post about it on forum so we can laugh too

lot of solutions i’m reading will just go against normal player behavior and there’s nothing worst than punishing normal players because few bads
(tho i like siege troll debuff )

Well, I was’nt aware there were siege troll…

Since the problem come from, if I understand well, alone player spamming siege ; give power and priority to the squad :

- Disable area siege cap for non finished siege (I was’nt aware there was one actually)
- A player joining a squad loose his ability to deploy siege (why he would do that, if he join a commander)
- A player in a squad build as a priority a siege from his commander.

That’s mean a commander will lead thanks to the mechanics of the game and not only on the goodwill of other player, and thus avoid the troll more efficiently. In addition a commander should be able to force player in his squad to build ONLY his siege by checking a box or something.

But what if a second commander come in and refuse to un-tag even if he don’t have a squad ?
-First, as i said earlier, only his squad is able to build as a priority the siege of his commander, but you can add a requirement by saying that only a squad of 10+ people can do that. So even if player join the wrong squad, he have a chance to build the good siege.

OR

-When two contesting commander are close of each other, they should be able to spawn a box where nearby player vote for the one they want to follow. Like in democracy, if 50%+ of player choose commander one, every voting player join the squad of the winner while he gain a buff like “commander adrenaline” or something, preventing any other constestant to be a commander near him for a span of, let’s say, 30 minutes.

“Commander Adrenaline : you have been chosen to be the leader of your army, any commander tag in a range of 2500 around you disappear on the map for squadless player, you can disable this buff by cliking here”

You can also add build area, for example : only ram can be built in less than 500 unit of doors…

With all these new mechanics, a player can always troll others by spamming siege everywhere but player in squad will basically ignore it. And since roamers don’t follow commander nor build siege to troll everyone, and players following a commander are in his squad, problem solved. I guess…

Make siege only throwable by commanders. This is kind of a rule in WvW anyway since it keeps things more organized. If someone wants to troll drop an AC on a gate you will see them tag up, this will probably discourage a lot of people from even doing it.

Exhaustion – This is not a good idea to do on deploy because, as it was mentioned before, siege is often dropped by a single person. It however would maybe be a good idea for BUILDING siege but not placing it. I like the idea that this could be mitigated if others help you build the item.

I also think forcing siege to be clicked on BEFORE you build might be a good thing. I’ve seen trolling where people will throw siege over a supply depot (so people would accidentally build it) or over a mesmer portal for example. I wouldn’t do this though unless you make siege easier to click on, particularly when they are close together.

None of these things will really STOP a dedicated troll but would probably curtail a considerable amount of casual trolling that some people do for a giggle now and again.

I’d like to see something where it says what you’re building. Rather than just press F to build, it could be changed to Press F to build X. That way if some one places a treb near a gate, it would be easy to not build it by accident.

Nokaru.7831:

• Flame Ram Trolling: Flame Rams should rot after 15 minutes if they have not dealt damage to anything. This will destroy 100% of all troll Flame Rams built inside structures, while leaving legitimate ones unaffected. I’ve seen players refresh many Flame Rams in an effort to try to siege cap a map.

Nooo, I use flame rams for mass fears (50 targets, pulses, adds up to about 12-15 seconds of fear with the right build)! Don’t ruin it!

Ok let me sum up, see if I’m getting this.

We are looking for a system/way to put and end to siege trolling without invloving massive GM presence, and extensive report verification.

What about some sort of automated backend system coupled with a report option of siege trolling/griefing/trolling? So if said troll is spending massive amounts of supply to build seige, and reports of this behavior are being made, the system checks and sees that X amount of supply has been spent by the troll within Y amount of time and compares this with the number of reports against them. The troll is then issued a temporary WvW/EotM ban until it can be reviewed and evaluated by a GM, and action taken accordingly.

Example: Troll is building 15 catapults in the middle of nowhere. They recieve 10 reports specifiying that they are trolling. The system checks and sees they spend 800 supply within the last 10 minutes. The system then issues a temp WvW/EotM banned and flags account for GM review. GM looks at account and activities, and issues an appropriate suspension/ban.

This way, legit defenders can build siege without worrying about being punished, people can repair without fear of reprisal. GMs don’t need to be called in until they see such a flag, and can take whatever measures are required.

Issue of Restricting Siege & Commanders:

• The problem with restricting siege is that Commanders frequently throw down most offensive and some defensive siege. Any restrictions that inhibit siege trolls would likely inhibit legitimate Commanders. There is also no way to really distinguish between a true Commander and a troll.
  
  My suggestion is not a low-hanging fruit one for this, but here it is: Make a way to distinguish between a true Commander and a troll.

Empowering Commanders & Possibly Progression:

• The simplest solution I have is to make some sort of mechanic whereby joining a Commander’s squad would then give them the ability to bypass some of the restrictions in place on maps. Players would not join the squad of a trolling Commander, and then they’d therefore be powerless. Players would however join a good Commander’s squad.
  
  They could get a different buff that would exempt them from this if they had enough supporting them.

Becka Williams.4978:

I think the exhaustion system when placing siege is probably the best way to go. Maybe 4 instead of 3. As for the people who say “you can place a lot of siege when defending a keep” that’s true. But presumably there’s a bunch of people in the keep, otherwise a: your siege won’t get built, and b: you’ll lose the keep anyways. If there’s other people, they can place siege too.

Last night I dropped 10 sup ac’s and a few balli’s to defend hills. There is no way we could have held hills with the exhaustion mechanic. Most pugs only have the random siege they receive from rank up chests and they have no idea where to throw them.

The only real solution is in game moderators. If anet doesn’t have the man power to take a look when X amount of reports come in, then you need to have volunteer moderators from your player base who can record the offending player and ban them on a temp basis while you review the footage. If you find the moderator is filing false reports you can ban his account.

I think a reporting system for siege would fit the bill. Allow players to report friendly siege for abuse and use those reports to correct the behavior. Essentially, what would happen is, based on the frequency and total of unique reports, remove the offending siege and/or apply the exhaustion debuff to the player that placed it based on their report history.

I like this because by tweaking the thresholds of the triggers and length of the punishment, you effectively can solve and prevent the majority of abuse cases. The most frequent offenders will statistically stand out enough that they can be targeted with long term punishments while the naive or occasionally mischievous moments can be corrected quickly.

Even aside from the automated system, the reports can also be used to help ease the workload on GMs by giving them some hard data to look at when assessing potential abusers.

And, for the record, I don’t like the idea of making a moderating system like this commander-based.

EDIT: I am assuming the threshold for the triggers is high enough that the potential for abuse would be quite low. By scaling those thresholds over time as well, it will require a concerted effort of a sizable group of trolls constantly following you to cause any real issues.

If a piece of siege gets 10 unique reports in the first minute of its existence, for example, there’s a good bet somebody just threw a gate ballista, while if those reports were spread over 30 minutes, it’s possible they were just trolls.

Making siege throwable only by commanders: It’s an horrible idea since there are newbie players and guilds. Them having no idea about squads or tags should also be able to siege the nearest tower. It’s also punishing the poor little guilds. This situation also forces commanders to tag up. Half of commanders and most of guild raids doesn’t even use tags. I don’t even mention how many rams I used to fear people on borderlands garrison gate while defending enemy North Camp on my solo/duo runs.

Making siege throwable only by squads: This is only a little better than the previous one. There are various problems with it. First, there is a squad member limit and usually there is only 1 commander tagged up on entire map. Second, it forces people to actually join a squad to just drop one single ram. At lower rating servers it’s a miracle to find a commander on certain time periods. It punishes the lower populated and over populated servers both. Only acceptable for medium range and still not good since some trolls I know had commander tags anyway.

Exhaust: It’s only good if it triggers on the supply, not sieges. But still, non built sieges should not count on siege limit for it to work.

I still think voting on siege is best method. It both gives a sense of unity on community and doesn’t punish good people. If it’s hard to code, maybe being able to seeing the names of people on built siege might work too since it’ll allow us to report them.

make diferent models sige so ppl can recognise it
dn like alredi done sige but diferent color and when its done some other color

I would settle for something along the lines of a commander marking allied siege for removal. Then 10 or so unique players need to interact once to vote/dismantle it.

Exhaustion is not only bad for commanders who throw down siege, but also sentries whose job it is to siege up an objective.

The less drama, the better. When a troll realizes he is not only ineffective but people quietly carry on despite their best efforts, he’ll crawl back under his bridge.

Just going to articulate my idea more fully.

SUGGESTION: Restrict players who are in a squad from building siege that isn’t placed by the commander whose squad they’ve joined
This addresses the issue of siege that is either intentionally or unintentionally placed against the commander’s will and which wastes some of the supply carried by a squad. This does not address the issue of wasting supply in defensive structures or building excessive siege to hit the cap.

Pros

• As an entirely voluntary system, this solution does not restrict players from spending supply or building siege in constructive ways under other circumstances.
• Encourages use of the squad system, which can be further developed to improve WvW depth.
• Encourages commanders to take responsibility for placing siege.
• Does not require a GM and is relatively straightforward to communicate.
• Can be implemented alongside other solutions.
• This system cannot be used or abused by trolls.
• Does not demand players’ further input once they have joined a commander’s squad.

Cons

• May be confusing if not communicated properly, and will be an inconvenience if players need to build siege placed by other people.
• Problem is not solved if players do not join a squad, and players may consequently be harassed if they refuse to join a squad.
• Only addresses part of the problem.

timmyf.1490:

We had a particularly bad troll on our server. We’ve had dozens of people report him over the course of a year, perhaps more. (He seems to have left now, thankfully.) He was so bad, in fact, that he was a part of our new player training.

Dropping blueprints gets expensive. He had a bunch of cheaper tricks… constantly repair walls that are actively being attacked… pull siege from Garrison while upgrades are running to build all the cannons, mortars, oil, etc.

You can devise as many systems as you like, but IF YOU DO NOT ADD IT TO THE TERMS OF SERVICE AND POLICE THE WORST OFFENDERS, NOTHING WILL CHANGE.

Sorry for the caps, but I find them necessary.

There is no accurate reporting function for “attempting to ruin the game for the rest of us.” In fact, when I’d ask people in map to report him, our troll would threaten them saying their accounts would be banned for wrongful reporting if they did. Scare tactics.

Update the TOS. Create an option for Competitive Event Manipulation. Hand out bans for the worst offenders. The problem will solve itself once players realize you’re not afraid to ban people.

Heck, don’t even ban them from the game, just WvW. “Sorry, you have to sit out of the rest of this matchup now” will go a long way.

This basically. There are too many problems with pretty much every other suggestion here, and the main reason this kind of behaviour does occur is indeed because it is allowed to. No hinderance, consequence or even attention up until this point, has ever been attributed to Siege Trolling, Hacking or even the more minor of general trolling, commander tag trolls for example, or bug abuse (every keep in EB for instance) or in the least cases of bad sportsmanship like spam emoting and corpse jumping. Again these offenses range from detrimental to the server in every way possible down to just a show of immaturity and general kittenbaggery, and the scale of the consequences should have a similar disparity, were they existant; the only reason these things happen is because it is well known to their minds that ANet doesn’t care in the slightest nor will they take any action in opposition of them.

The problem, and all of these problems, only exists due to the fact that the people who commit them have nothing to fear from doing so. Banning someone either entirely or just from WvW after they’re accumulated >300 reports over a few days about the same thing, or after seeing a video of them blatantly siege trolling/hacking, is neither heavyhanded nor unreasonable. If you as ANet would get involved, the frequency of these transgressions would be infintely fewer.

John Corpening.9847:

To kick off the brainstorm I’ll throw out this idea:

1. When a player places a piece of siege they receive a stack of “Exhaustion”
2. A stack of “Exhaustion” expires after three minutes
3. If a player has three stacks of “Exhaustion” they can no longer place siege

This won’t work because of practical reasons. I run with a havoc guild group and I am always placing the siege. If exhaustion worked like this it would limit our groups ability to siege/defend with smaller numbers due to the limited debuff. This would once again favor large groups over smaller groups, and I feel that there is enough of that in wvw/eotm already. The most obvious solutions would be to either:

a) Actually use disciplinary action on those guilty of siege trolling
b) Remove the siege cap

Sadly, neither of these solutions seem to be possible for anet. Any passive system I feel would punish players that are not breaking the rules. The best way would be for traditional GM action, based on a simple reporting system. It’s also important to remember that not everyone who uses siege needs to be a commander, and it’s also very easy for a siege troll to get a tag.

The dismantle idea is a good one.

Siege commanders can mark it, it takes 5 people to dismantle it, can not be the commander.

Each person dismantling gets 1 supply.

Add “counters” to deployed siege. A “counter” is given when a player interacts with the deployed siege and clicks an ability on it that says “veto.” If a piece of deployed siege reaches 20 “counters” it is dismantled and the supply is put back into the maps spawn location supply depot. No player may vote on any one piece of deployed siege more than once.

There’s no perfect way to stop this. Something will suffer but each solution needs to address both the siege capping AND the waste of supply. I believe this veto system will do so. The counters need to be high enough that the enemy would have to pool significant amounts of people to dismantle siege but that homeland players can do so with a small force. I think a good balance is in the 20-25 counter range. Also, note that deployed does not mean finished siege. If we specify finished siege then the enemy will just build it to 75%.

Just a thought.

Siege has a timer on it. Of which in some cases has been frustrating of defenders that have the thankless job of spending their play time sitting in a keep “ticking” siege. Those of you that do that, thank you!

what if.
At the time that Siege is despawned say.. 50 to 75 percent (or 100?? ) of the supply used to create said siege returns to the nearest supply drop. Such as if you created it in a Keep. it despawns because you missed the tick, the supply returns to the keep stockpile. If for whatever reason you lost the fort. and the opposing faction didn’t break the stuff it returns to the nearest camp you control.

What does that accomplish?
pointless siege will only be pointless for a short time. before the supply is returned to usable.

does it actually resolve a siege troll issue? I don’t think so. but it will at least offer some respite for the lost supply?

(( just a though might be worth discussing. i am short on time so i apologise if it does not make any sense? ))

Howell Qagan.9752:

Now I don’t want to give ideas to anyone… but literally any player can join any commander. Even from enemy servers. So this isn’t a solution, the troll would just have a few people join their squad from the other server. Or from the guild.

yeah, this is a problem for sure….

The ideas I like so far:
Having the person throwing the siege name on it
Having a map based voting system to ban trolls from building siege for a hour/day/week and make the ban work even if the player has logged off prior to the vote
Having a map based voting system to allow a player to destroy siege for a limited time 5,10,15 minutes

I would think that a modification of the party/squad system that allows for kicking players from parties could be adapted to such a purpose. This requires no mod input and is self policing.

I think someone might have mentioned this, but here are my few cents.

Pre-Req – Commander Tag w/players in squad(Requires increase of squad size) = certain number depending on population of map for player’s server. (this can also be tweaked so that if squad(of course w/increased limit) has 25+ or 40 players in it, the commander can destroy siege)

1. Cast a vote to destroy siege (map wide)(Could also try to see if multiple siege items can be selected for the vote).
2. Cast a vote to report user placing siege map wide.
3. Have a right click menu option on the siege to select the to options listed above.
4. If you cannot increase the size of a squad add a system to where squads can be linked via a commander agreement of some sort. This can also allow you to see 2 commander tags (might be good in bigger/higher tier battles).

Of course more can be added or maybe this might be a horrible idea, who knows =P

I like the majority vote idea, too and also a refund of the supply used on the siege based on its age. That is, if the siege is minutes old, we get a larger refund. If it is over an hour old (ticked many times probably) we don’t get anything since the piece has obviously been accepted and people are just being greedy The refund would only count inside of a structure, of course. Unbuilt siege would just dest faster than normal once the vote is definitive.

I do not think commanders should have anything to do with siege actually, a lot of defending siege is done by people like me who rarely tag up. We also do havoc etc and lay down siege where appropriate.

In an ideal world though, to really give that ‘war simulation’ feeling, I’d love to just shoot characters who sabotage but I know that would get abused. How cool it would be to vote or mark someone until they become red? It would be sheer chaos but a girl can dream

Original post:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Please-Get-rid-of-siege-decay/first#post4114325

Here are some of my ideas:
- Voting system for troll siege, click on and vote to delete siege similar to a party kick mechanic.
- Original player who dropped the blueprint can always delete.
- All vote/delete actions are logged to the chat event log (like emotes) with player names.
- Siege is mostly indefinite, however enemies who capture an camp/tower/keep now also capture the siege.
- Open field siege not attached to a capture has a decay timer.

What would help me tremendously, while better systems are being developed, is the ability to more easily click or identify placed blueprints. Though still challenging in a swarm of bodies, a clearly identifiable trebuchet build site has a better shot at being ignored among ram build sites, especially if its nameplate were tagged with its owner, such as with a minion or mini.

Physically clicking on individual build sites is also difficult, as other targets seem to take higher click priority. I have no ideas or suggestions to handle this outside of maybe rabbit season/duck season signposts sticking out of the build site that are very easily clickable. Even when no trolling is taking place, it can be difficult to target particular ram build sites when the context F wants you to “use” an occupied ram.

I think we are going too far in talking about adding new or changing existing features of the game. The only features in this case that need to be implemented are a better and smarter reporting system. We are talking about a very small minority of individuals and independent mass reporting of individuals shouldn’t be too difficult to investigate. Please dont change gameplay over a few people. This could change the whole culture of “reporting doesnt do anything” and help restore the faith.

Edit: Thank you for starting this discussion!!!

See, I knew this would happen. Rather than just dealing with the tiny minority of people who perpetuate abuse by handing out bans (trust me, only a few bans would be enough to make people think this wasn’t so cool anymore), we’re gonna end up with a convoluted system which penalizes everyone and makes it a lot more annoying to legitimately siege up our towers and keeps.

gg.

Three suggestions I would give are:

1. When someone puts out a blueprint, it’s notified in the chat who it is and what siege weapon it is. This would help identify the troll and also help everyone know what sort of siege weapon has just been thrown without hovering over it.

2. Show every siege weapon, finished and under construction, on the map just like we can see trebuchets. This will allow everyone to notice if there’s anything off on the map, like a siege troll mass producing siege weapons at a keep or tower to sabotage the supplies.

Would the feature above, number 1, be in place, you’d just need to go close to that area and you’d be notified in chat who is doing this. Making it very easy to report the person.

Destroyed siege weapons will only disappear from the map once someone reaches the radius to see it, or the siege weapon only disappears after a few minutes. This is to avoid siege weapons becoming a sort of “warning” system.

3. Restrict siege building to 1-2 blueprints for every player. You need to join a Commander’s squad to increase that limit. The more people who are with the Commander, the more blueprints you can use.

This is last because whilst most useful, it requires more features made for the Commander tag, such as management of the squads just like a raid group. The best way is to only allow a Commander to invite people and able to kick them. So that trolls can be rid of and end up restricted with how many siege weapons they can throw out. Restricting that isn’t much of a punishment for normal players, only trolls.

Can we come up with a system that doesn’t involve constant policing from GMs?

Why bother creating a flawed system when its probably less than 20 people across all servers who siege troll people? Just ban the people deliberately trolling when people send videos of them. It’s not hard.

Likely all the ways you can think of to ‘fix’ the issue of troll siege could actually have serious unintended consequences and punish the wrong players while not having a real effect on ‘trolls’.

1) No player should be allowed to spend more than 50 supply within a 10 minute period.

2) If you are in a commander’s squad you should only be able to see and interact with his build sites. (you can see all siege, but only his build sites).

3) Any player that drops siege is the owner of that siege for the first 5 minutes, after that it should be neutral for all friendlies (ei you can’t kick others off).

4) instead of reading “press F to build”, the text should read “press F to build ‘X’ siege” (ei. treb, ram, arrowcart etc).

Cake.4920:

Can we come up with a system that doesn’t involve constant policing from GMs?

Why bother creating a flawed system when its probably less than 20 people across all servers who siege troll people? Just ban the people deliberately trolling when people send videos of them. It’s not hard.

^ This. Please listen.

Ban the tiny, tiny minority who are partaking in this now and set the precedent that it is an actionable offense and it will all but eradicate it forever. We do not need changes to the core mechanics of how siege and supply work.

So far all of these ideas punish other players. Remember it has to be something that can mitigate immoral play without too much of an effect on others.

Add “counters” to deployed siege. A “counter” is given when a player interacts with the deployed siege and clicks an ability on it that says “veto.” If a piece of deployed siege reaches 20 “counters” it is dismantled and the supply is put back into the maps spawn location supply depot. No player may vote on any one piece of deployed siege more than once.

They cannot ban a player for placing siege and using supply. Lets just eliminate that line of thought right now. The player only has to claim ignorance and then Anet as a company is liable for discrimination.

What im about to suggest may hurt some aspects of gameplay, but to me and many others they are unhealthy as is.

First you need to clearly define a structure that is meant for defense. Towers / Keeps / Castles. Then you need to dictate the area of which around those defensive siege may be placed.

I have expressly left off supply camps for the sole reason that setting up siege in a supply camp is not something that is healthy to WvW.

I have explicitly said defensive siege for the following reason. Siege that is used to assault ie. Cata’s / Rams / Trebs should never be inside a keep or utilized for Defensive purposes. These should have a no build indicator inside keeps as the promote stagnate and ways to defend that cripple the offensive aspect.

Now that you have defined offensive siege you can define defensive siege as Arrow Carts / Ballista’s and Neutral Siege as Golems.

Each Structure should have with in the radius a set number of both offensive, defensive and neutral siege it can have.

Now to get to preventing the troll. Each player regardless of status now has a supply burden. That is to say a soft cap of how much supply they can spend per engagement. That number can be fairly liberal lets say 500. The only way to improve said burden is to actively go out and participate in WvW events, taking towers keeps, camps , sentries. Doing so replenishes your burden. This should scale appropriately. I.E towers restore 200, keeps 300, castles 500, camps 50, sentries 10. or some scale thereof. Perhaps have an ICD in there in such rare cases where no objective can be capped in a certain time frame.

Repairing fixed placements such as walls / doors / cannons/ oil / mortar do not count against your burden.

Additionally. You may want to remove the ability to carry over supply from other borderlands as this too helps in trolling and really only promotes blitzkriegs and less tactical approaches. Doing so would hinder zergplay, something you’ve long stated you want to do but have made very few good steps toward doing so.

Ok yes ban them. Then see if they have alt accounts on the same ip and send them warning letters. Its these alt main accounts on their home servers that they really care about.

Quells.2498:

They cannot ban a player for placing siege and using supply. Lets just eliminate that line of thought right now. The player only has to claim ignorance and then Anet as a company is liable for discrimination.

Anet is not liable for anything; they can ban anyone for any reason. Intent is a very good reason to ban people, other games do it all the time.

They won’t do it. Ever. I promise.

Is there anyway to add a notification for when anyone in the area is deploying/using siege in chat? Something like:

SiegeTroller has deployed a Balista
SiegeTroller has entered an Omega Golem

Preferably with the ability to right-click on the name of the person to report them on the spot. (also, maybe something players can click on to select the legitimate siege without have to try and find the exact pixel to mouse over, which can be a problem with even legit siege if everyone decided to deploy their rams at the same exact place)

Usually, the best way to prevent destructive behavior is making sure that people affected by it have the means to easily identify the trolls and report them. Knowing that they will get caught and punished if they persist will probably stop most cases of trolls stacking bad siege on legitimate siege to block their building/deployment, without having to change anything with how siege is deployed.

Though it still leaves the problem stacking siege anywhere on the map to hit the map cap, and saboteurs wasting supply from a keep/tower to prevent an upgrade from going through. I don’t have a good idea for the former, but for the latter…

…What if, when a worker-required upgrade (like walls or the gate) gets activated, any new supply get “reserved” for the workers for their sole use. However, if any enemy siege gets placed within a certain radius of the point, and/or a part of the tower/keep/SMC gets damaged, the reserved status is removed, and player can gather supply from that place to build siege/repair again.

TexZero.7910:

I have explicitly said defensive siege for the following reason. Siege that is used to assault ie. Cata’s / Rams / Trebs should never be inside a keep or utilized for Defensive purposes. These should have a no build indicator inside keeps as the promote stagnate and ways to defend that cripple the offensive aspect.

Trebs do significant damage to other siege for a reason you know, they are very much intended to be used for both offensive and defensive purposes.

Quells.2498:

They won’t do it. Ever. I promise.

Anet won’t ever turn gw2 into a viable esport, or actually fix many of their problems with this game.

That doesn’t mean its wrong to try.

I’m not really a fan of the exhaustion idea simply because what if you’re putting down a whole bunch of golem blueprints in preparation for a golem army attack? Or you need a whole bunch of, say, arrow carts? To stop a zerg in its tracks. I can see this damaging WvW and EOTM quickly.

What I suggest is a system that blocks you from placing siege in very specific areas where a particular blueprint should NEVER be seen anyway. For example, flame ram blueprints up against any destroyable walls (like in EOTM near the badlands wurm walls in particular), any open areas (no one uses flame rams against zergs, c’mon…), and any place really where, well, flame rams should never be seen anyway, other than for gate areas.

And things like ballista’s right outside of a gate – I see it so often… players just chuck useless ballista siege on top of legitimate flame ram build sites near gates, and thus ruin player supply.

I don’t know, just my 2 cents. It would certainly help, but it wouldn’t solve it completely because siege trolls would just be limited to places they can place siege. There still needs to be some sort of mechanism that prevents them from putting useless siege on top of other building sites.

Perhaps a siege block feature like… ANY other blueprints (other than ram blueprints) can’t be placed on top of flame ram building sites & already built flame rams? And furthermore, no more flame rams could be built until the first is completed. This would prevent 1) troll siege near gates at least, and 2) wasted supply on multiple flame rams.

I think that would be good. I mean no one puts arrow carts right on top of flame ram sites anyway… People use them from a small distance away (like a range of about 600). And rams are the only things that should be used near gates anyway (and well… golems, but they shouldn’t be built right next to a gate in the first place).

The same could be applied to destroyable walls – only catapults could be placed there, and only 1 could be built at a time, to prevent wasted supply. No other blueprints could be placed on top of the catapult building site or already finished catapults, and things like Trebuchets would have to be built a fair distance away from the wall – like a range of 600 (or 900) away – so people can distinguish whether it’s legitimate, or troll siege, and decide whether to spend their supply on it.

Any type of debuffs will just be worked around. These are determined individuals who enjoy lies and deception as main activities. Dont believe what they tell you. Making their job take longer wont work because they are getting paid anyway! Just ban them!